Free The Big Bad City by Ed McBain Page A

all were.”
    He pulled a tissue from the box on his desk, dabbed at his eyes, blew his nose. The detectives waited.
    “I’m sorry,” he said again.
    “Dr. Hall,” Brown said, “did she happen to mention where she might be going after work last Friday?”
    “No, she didn’t.”
    “When was the last time you saw her that day?”
    “Let me think.”
    They waited.
    “Just before the shift ended, I would suppose.”
    “What time would that have been?”
    Helen Daniels had told them she and Mary had left the hospital together at a little past three. They were merely attempting to verify this now.
    “Two-thirty?” Hall said. “A quarter to three?”
    “Leaving the hospital, did you say?”
    “No, no. The shift ends at three. This would have been a little before then.”
    “Where’d you see her?”
    “Just outside the women’s locker room. Talking to one of the nurses.”
    “Which one? Would you remember?”
    “I’m sorry,” Hall said. “Her back was to me.”
    “How many nurses were on that shift?” Brown asked.
    “It varies from day to day.”
    “Would you have a record of who was here?”
    “Yes, certainly.”
    “Could we have it, please? Doctors, too,” Carella said.
    Hall looked at him.
    “Doctors, too, of course,” he said.
    What Sonny couldn’t figure out was why Carella and his partner—he assumed the big black dude with him was his partner and not his goddamn chauffeur—keptshuttling back and forth between St. Margaret’s Hospital and all these places had to do with religion. Saturday it was the convent up there in Riverhead. Now, at four in the afternoon, it was this church here on Yarrow, not too distant from the walk-up apartment building they’d gone to. Our Lady of Flowers it said in the letters chiseled over the arched front doors.
    You’d think the fuckin pope had got himself shot or something.
    Father Frank Clemente was a man in his fifties, wearing a black cotton sweater over black slacks and a black T-shirt. He looked a lot like a priest, Carella supposed, but he could have passed as well for any cool dude enjoying a cappuccino at an outdoor table on Jefferson Avenue. Instead, he and the two detectives sat on wrought-iron chairs as black as his attire, around a wide stone tabletop set on a stone pilaster, sipping lemonade the good father had himself made.
    “Mary was here for mass last week,” he said. “She …”
    “When last week?” Carella asked.
    “Tuesday night.”
    Three days before she was killed, Carella thought.
    “We had a drink together afterward.”
    Bottle of vodka in her fridge, Brown thought.
    “She seemed troubled,” Father Frank said. “She was normally so cheerful and outgoing, but that night …”
    He finds her somehow distant on this Tuesday night, the eighteenth day of August. It’s almost as if there’s a weight on her shoulders she wishes to share and yet is reluctant to reveal. He has known her since she came to this city in February, a prayerful nun whocomes to mass at his church at least once, sometimes twice a week. He knows of her difficult ministry at St. Margaret’s, and he thinks at first she may have lost a patient today, so many of them are terminally ill. But no, it isn’t that, she assures him everything is fine at the hospital, everything just fine, Frank, thank you for your concern.
    Some nuns have drinking problems; some priests as well, for that matter. It is not an easy path they’ve chosen, and sometimes the hardships of the religious life can seem overwhelming. The church has programs for those unfortunates who need help, but Mary isn’t one of them, and neither is he.
    He keeps a bottle of twelve-year-old scotch in a cabinet in his study, and it is there that he mixes the drink for her. Two fingers of scotch in a tall Venetian glass Father Frank brought back from Italy when he had his audience with Pope John last summer. Three ice cubes. Fill the glass to the rim with soda. The same for himself. They carry the